Higher red: why China's universities may never make the grade as world-class institutions.

AuthorFreedman, Josh

Every March, thousands of representatives from around China descend on Beijing for annual government meetings to lay out directions for the coming year. The so-called "Two Meetings" for the legislature and the political consultative committee--part policy, part show--offer delegates a chance to raise their concerns about what needs fixing and how to do it. In March 2010, Beijing was abuzz with talk about universities: weeks earlier, the Ministry of Education had released a draft of an education reform plan for the next decade that would get rid of "the ways in which schools are run like government appendages." Key to this change was a policy of "de-administration" (qu xingzhenghua) that would limit the power of government-affiliated administrators in universities. If implemented, it would reorient China's top schools toward the model of the university as an independent ivory tower, an ideal that liberal academics had long hoped to realize in China.

The impetus for change was not confined to academics sitting on campus; the country's top leadership voiced their support as well. China's higher education system was still weighed down by remnants of the Soviet era, when the central government refashioned universities as specialized technical institutes under tight central control. More autonomy, leaders hoped, could propel China's top schools into the upper echelon of global universities alongside the Harvards, Stanfords, and Oxfords of the world--able to command greater international respect and train future innovators to drive China's economy past the middle-income trap. The de-administration of universities would allow China to compete in the twenty-first century, in terms of both higher education and economic growth.

Zhu Qingshi, the former president of the prestigious China University of Science and Technology, led the charge for de-administration at the 2010 meetings. A respected chemist and advocate of higher education reform, Zhu had just signed on to lead the newly formed Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen. Channeling the innovative spirit of a city that had grown from a small fishing village to a global manufacturing powerhouse in mere decades, SUSTech sought to be the first professor-led and bureaucracy-free university. Administrators would not be given government-level rankings like at other universities.

To Zhu, changing this structure was a key to a better higher education system. "Many professors now pursue bureaucratic rank instead of academic excellence," Zhu told the journal Science in 2009. "If you attain a high rank, you get money, a car, research funding. This is why Chinese universities have lost vitality."

Zhu and the reformers in Shenzhen envisioned a Chinese university more like the California Institute of Technology than Tsinghua University or Peking University, the top universities in China. Frustrated with Chinese universities' inability to cultivate enough talented, innovative graduates, Zhu wanted China's leading universities to bring together the synergies of teaching and research. Within ten years, Zhu said, SUSTech's new model of Chinese higher education would position it among the top universities in Asia.

It was a bold plan, and Zhu charged ahead. Rather than gradually push the envelope of reform, Zhu quickly instituted structural changes that went further than any other top university in China. He wanted to bypass the national college entrance exam and allocate the authority to issue diplomas to the school itself, rather than central government agencies. The Ministry of Education, unwilling to accept this ambitious slate of changes all at once, balked. The forty-five students in SUSTech's first class, which did not take the entrance exam, were not awarded official diplomas by the Ministry of Education. The scope of reform was scaled back. Zhu retired a few years later, his goal of major higher education reform unfulfilled; he ducked out of the spotlight to live a quiet retirement in his old hometown, where he spends his time studying the philosophy of nature.

In the more than twenty years since former President Jiang Zemin launched a campaign to build 100 "worldclass universities" in China by the end of the twenty-first century, China's central government has poured funding into the country's leading universities. Policymakers allocate extra resources to a group...

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